The Connected Core

A group of humanities and social science faculty have been working to build a “core within the core” program, inspired by Purdue’s Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program.

What is being planned?

A Certificate in The Connected Core

Students completing 15 credits in the connected core will earn a certificate that will appear on their transcript. The certificate will be named for their chosen track. Courses in the program feature challenging texts and renewable assignments; students making the most of the experience will build a digital portfolio of work completed in these courses that will offer evidence of the value of the experience beyond the line on their transcript.

First-Year Sequence

Each track will begin with connected-core versions of “The Seminar in Academic Inquiry and Writing” (CC 1.1) and “Thinking Historically about…” (CC 6.1). For students who have AP credit for either of those courses, we might consider offering connected core versions of CC 5.1 (Critical Thinking and Problem Solving), CC 7.1 (Individual and Society), and CC 8.1 (Global and Intercultural Awareness). Any two of these tier-1 courses will provide the groundwork for selecting a track.

Connected-Core First-Year Courses will be very similar to other core courses, but feature two additional outcomes that emphasize the student role in determining relevance:

  • Students will be able to articulate how the texts assigned in the course are relevant to their lives or career plans
  • Students will be able to articulate how the methods of inquiry taught in the course are relevant to their lives or career plans

Possible Tracks

Each track will consist of three courses that will ideally be taken in a particular order (though not necessarily in specific semesters). The key will be to offer all courses regularly enough that all students can fit them into their schedules.We began by building tracks with specific degree programs in mind, but we are moving away from this to develop tracks that will attract a range of majors:

Humans and Machines

  • Optional: “Players and Factions” (CC 5.1) featuring the Reacting to the Past game “Rage against the Machine”
  • “Machine Learning and… (CC 9.1)
    • “How we Read,” thinking through OCR and enormous digitization efforts featuring a TBD work of fiction in which reading is transformative
  • “Philosophies of Progress,” featuring a TBD text
  • Historical Perspectives on Technology, featuring a TBD text

Criminality

  • Optional: “Players and Factions” (CC 5.1) featuring the Reacting to the Past game “The Trial of Galileo”
  • “Representations of The Criminal” (CC 9.1) featuring English translations of Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man (1911) and The Female Offender (1895)
  • “Historical Perspectives on Crime and Punishment” (CC 6.2) featuring Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishment (1764)
    • Section focusing on the American West, including episodes of David Milch’s Deadwood
    • Section focusing on the Medieval period
  • “Philosophies of Aberrance” (CC 7.1) featuring Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)

Self-Fashioning

  • Optional: “Players and Factions” (CC 5.1) featuring a TBD Reacting to the Past game
  • “Constructing Identity: Self and Other” (CC 6.2) featured Castiglione’s The Book of The Courtier (1528)
  • “Paid to Persuade” (CC 9.1) featuring Plato’s The Gorgias (380 BCE)
  • “Curating the Self” (CC 7.1) featuring a TBD Memoir and engaging social media

***Other possible tracks include “Medical Humanities,” “Communities,” and “Evolving (evolution, climate change, space exploration)”

Recruitment

All incoming students will be invited to express interest in the connected core during the English placement process (or perhaps during their application to the university, as is the case with the honors program?). We will work with the Center for Student Success to build fall-semester schedules that will set interested students on the right path through one or more connected-core versions of first-year courses. It may be best not to restrict these courses to students who have expressed interest in the connected core; we might find that students who didn’t initially seek out the program enjoy their experience and choose to continue.

Navigating Advising/Registration

Collaboration with advisors from large degree programs will help us identify days and times that will make it possible for students to fit connected-core courses into their worksheets. Some departments may be open to identifying times when they will not schedule major-degree courses to facilitate this effort. It will also be beneficial if students expressing interest in the connected core could be assigned advisors friendly to the endeavor.

How Will Courses in This Program Be Different from Other Core Courses?

Connected Texts

Each course will be built around at least one text and a renewable assignment that will be included in each section offered. Because of the sequence of these courses, faculty will be able to build assignments that gesture back to texts that students will have already read, something that is not done in any systematic way in core courses at present. For students who haven’t taken those prior courses, faculty will be able to point to open editions of these texts and resources that former students have created to make them less intimidating. Discussion about connected texts across courses will be made all the richer by discussion about the texts faculty choose to assign alongside them (part of a larger set of connected texts that faculty are encouraged to draw from). The goal is to create an environment where students might advocate for texts they’ve found compelling or meaningful to become part of the connected core.

Faculty Collaboration

As the program grows, faculty beyond the creators/proposers of particular courses will begin to offer additional sections of the courses. These faculty members may specialize in other disciplines in the humanities (so, an English professor might offer a course designed by a history professor and a sociology professor may teach a course designed by a philosophy professor). The conversations emerging from this sort of interdisciplinary staffing will be one of the major benefits of participation in the program, which aims to get us out of our silos to share exciting ideas about humanities texts and concepts. Faculty teaching these courses will draw on their own expertise as they develop iterations of the course, while maintaining at least one common text and a common renewable assignment. Faculty teaching the course will work together to assess the courses and discuss possible new texts for inclusion.

A Website Advertising Courses

Students pursuing the connected core will be able to peruse upcoming offerings on a dynamic website released well before they meet with their advisors to build schedules. This website will help students see the work that students in the courses have produced and get excited about their choices.

Additional Possibilities

  • All courses in this program will have a public course website on the OpenLab platform and course offerings will be advertised on OpenLab
  • All courses in this program will keep textbook costs below a certain figure
  • All courses in the program will all be writing intensive, meaning that faculty will have participated in the WAC workshop and worked good writing pedagogy into their iteration of the course. This could actually help us decide how to expand the group of faculty participating in this initiative when we decide to do so.
  • courses in the program will use labor-based (or contract) grading and students will build a portfolio of their work in these courses.